With 'Last Days of Pompeii,' Cleveland Museum of Art puts artistic expressions front and center

By Mark Meszoros

Saturday, March 9, 2013

It may be more important to understand what the newest exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art isn't than what it is.

When folks see that it's called "The Last Days of Pompeii," some are bound to expect a showcase for relics dug up by archeologists since the early 1700s in the city that was home to 20,000 or more folks before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

"And most exhibitions about Pompeii have been exactly that," says Jon Seydl, exhibition co-organizer and the Paul A. and Edith Ingalls Vignos Jr. curator of European paintings and sculpture at the museum.

Instead, he says, this is "a show about Pompeii in the modern imagination," one that explores how artists since the 18th century have expressed thoughts and visions related to the partially buried city.

"I wanted people to see -- immediately as they walked in (the exhibition's space) -- Andy Warhol's late '80s 'Vesuvius' series and a 2002 sculpture by Antony Gormley as a real signal that this is about something else entirely."

You also see, upon entering the exhibition, a large, cartoonish painting by Lucy McKenzie, a Scottish muralist. "Cheyney and Eileen Disturb a Historian at Pompeii" (2005) is anything but a serious, meaningful take on the subject.

"This story is basically about two friends of hers who go to the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, run into this professor and startle him -- and that's it," Seydl says. "It's a completely trivial anecdote."

However, this room that greets visitors also has plaster casts of remains of Pompeian citizens -- which Seydl calls the most recognizable thing associated with the disaster.

This initial segment of the show serves as a microcosm of it.

"It's incredibly serious on the one hand, and deeply tragic, and totally lighthearted," he says.

Featuring more than 100 works of art from, Seydl estimates, about 40 museums and organizations, "The Last Days of Pompeii" was organized by CMA and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where Seydl worked before joining CMA five years ago. (He says he shares the idea for the exhibition with two other curators, adding that it goes back about seven years.)

The show takes its name from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel "The Last Days of Pompeii," which, according to a CMA news release, "combined a Victorian love story with the sensational subplots of pagan decadence, Christianity and volcanic eruption."

"It's hard to even explain," says Seydl about the novel's popularity at the time. "It was kind of 'Twilight' (and) 'The Da Vinci Code' all combined. It was, like, the hugest fiction hit of the 19th century. Everybody knew this story. And if they didn't read it, they saw a play."

The exhibition adds a subtitle, "Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection," taken from the three organizing themes.

A visitor first encounters "Decadence," where Seydl stops to admire a large 1880 work by Italian painter Francesco Netti titled "After a Gladiator Fight During a Meal at Pompeii." It depicts two gladiators fighting in the street amid well-to-do onlookers. As with many of the other works, Seydl says, what's depicted is pure fiction. Gladiators were expensive commodities saved for battles in large arenas -- not in the streets of a relatively small city. Nonetheless, it is an interesting vision.

The "Apocalypse" section looks at grand destruction, and not just that of Pompeii.

"It's essentially this idea that Pompeii was this archetype disaster to which all other disaster get compared," he says.

In "Resurrection," the curator spends time talking about a marble sculpture -- American Randolph Rogers' "Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii" -- drawing the eye to the middle of the gallery space. Nydia is a slave girl from the aforementioned novel who, despite being blind, knows the city intimately.

"(Rogers) made literally 150 versions of this, so even the sculpture itself becomes this massive pop-culture phenomenon," Seydl says.

Last but not least, "The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection" boasts a gallery devoted to 10 large paintings by late American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. The incomplete works had a different original purpose.

"They were commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant at the top of the Seagram Building in New York," Seydl says. "And in the middle of the commission -- which he can't stand doing from the beginning because he can't stand this idea of doing basically decoration for a restaurant -- he goes to Pompeii and sees Pompeii in wall paintings, and it totally changes his perspective on not just this project, but his painting in general, which becomes darker and moodier from that point."

Getting back to the idea of what the exhibition isn't, Seydl says he doesn't want CMA visitors to think of it as a window into a world many centuries ago.

"Every generation makes kind of a new Pompeii for themselves," he says. "Instead of thinking about Pompeii as this time tunnel that takes you back to the truth of life in antiquity, it's really kind of more of a mirror. It reflects back things we want to see."

Details

What: "The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection."

Where: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Blvd.

When: Through July 7.

Admission: $15 for adults, $13 for college students with an ID and for seniors; $7 for children 6 to 17; and free for younger children and CMA members. Admission to the rest of the museum is free.